It’s tough to imagine breaking up a lazy Sydney morning with a day-trip to Morocco and then get home by bedtime, but Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl is aiming to make this happen.
His supersonic jet company is aiming for its new jet to begin flying this year, with an eventual goal of flying anywhere in the world in four hours for a measly $130.
This would mean a current marathon flight, such as the 17 hours and 25 minutes from Perth to London would become around 77% faster.
While this goal may still be a couple of generations off, Mr Scholl says the company’s prototyped commercial jet ‘Overture’, will begin flying in 2026 and be able to fly from New York to London in three hours and 15 minutes. Currently this flight is around seven to eight hours.
The company also claims it will be able to fly between Sydney and Los Angeles in eight hours and 30 minutes, shaving around five hours off current speeds.
Overture is designed to sit between 65 and 88 people and will fly over 500 different routes that will benefit from the jet’s outrageous speeds. The seats will be all business class, meaning you’ll sit in luxury as you cruise at 60,000ft.
While Overture is still a few years off, the company also plans to begin flying its XB-1 supersonic aircraft later this year, which you can see getting prepped for action here.
Mr Scholl wants his company to be transformative by making supersonic jets not only operate commercially, but also be affordable.
A French-British airliner Concorde which used to operate commercially, used to cost US$15,000 for a return trip, which Mr Scholl feels defeats the purpose.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” Mr Scholl told to CNN.
“Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”
Mr Scholl continues about how these flight speeds can change the world: “It changes where we can vacation, changes where we can do business, changes who you can fall in love with or you can be close to.”
However, Mr Scholl concedes, “It’s going to take us time time to get there.”
“I find it helpful to think much further out and say, ‘where do we want to be in a decade or two? And what’s possible at that timescale?’, then you work backwards and say, ‘how do we get there?’.
Also important to Mr Scholl is sustainability, with Boom Supersonic aiming to create a ‘carbon neutral’ plane.
“What you’re basically doing is sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, liquefying it into the jet fuel, then you put that in the aeroplane,” explains Mr Scholl.
“So when it goes out the back of the aeroplane. You’re just moving carbon around in a circle.”
